10 ‘free’ Commands to Check Memory Usage in Linux

Linux is one of the most popular open source operating system and comes with huge set of commands. The most important and single way of determining the total available space of the physical memory and swap memory is by using “free” command.

The Linux “free” command gives information about total used and available space of physical memory and swap memory with buffers used by kernel in Linux/Unix like operating systems.

10 Linux Free Command Examples

This article provides some useful examples of “free” commands with options, that might be useful for you to better utilize memory that you have.

1. Display System Memory

Free command used to check the used and available space of physical memory and swap memory in KB. See the command in action below.

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Thank you for the share, great read. How can I reduce the memory consumption used? I am using a virtual box with ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I have only 82M of 500M free memory left?
I might guess it is because the low memory I have assigned to Virtual machine 512M upon initialising it.

@Sinan,
500MB is not enough to run Ubuntu 14.04, you need at least 1G or 2G of ram to run Ubuntu properly..or else you can stop some unwanted applications to reduce memory consumption, you need to use top command to trace the applications which are utilizing high ram usage..